Rhino prevail in a near-perfect championship game.
October 30, 2024 by Edward Stephens in Recap with 0 comments
Ultiworld’s coverage of the 2024 Club Championships is presented by Spin Ultimate; all opinions are those of the author(s). Find out how Spin can get you, and your team, looking your best this season.
At long last, #9 Portland Rhino Slam! have a championship. The 2024 iteration of the 35-year old program beat #8 New York PoNY left, right, and center to earn their first ever title. They are the eighth different men’s division champion in the past eight years. Jack Hatchett (2G, 1A), Raphy Hayes (2G), Henry Ing (4A), David Sealand (2G, 2A), and Daniel Lee (2B) were outstanding in the final.
Rhino’s lopsided 15-6 victory – the largest margin in a men’s final in 30 years – was the product of a brutally clean offensive performance. The O-line did not give up a goal, and the D-line converted all eight of their break chances. Altogether, Rhino turned the disc over on a paltry two occasions. It will go down as one of the most clinical performances in Nationals history.
Rhino announced their offensive priorities without delay as Ing sent a perfectly measured backhand to Hatchett on the first point. That play threw down a challenge for PoNY’s defense: they would have to stop the deep game if they were to have any chance at a break.
“That’s Rhino ultimate, baby,” said Bui. “We just bang on people.”
“No other comments needed,” added Lee.
The versatile play of several of the team’s O-line staples – Hayes, Ing, Hatchett, Mica Glass, and Matt Rehder – throughout the weekend more than justified that game plan. Rhino (rightly) believed that they had too many deep throwing and deep receiving threats for even a D-line as talented as PoNY’s to contain.
“The deep game is back, and it’s sexier than ever. Small ball is dead,” said Hayes.
The Rhino defense came out, if anything, even hungrier than their offense. The way they remained locked in on PoNY’s headline offensive stars, put themselves in position to bid on close plays, switched seamlessly to counteract deep-under cutting pairings, and seemed to see all of the preferred throwing lines before even PoNY became aware of them meant that disruptive plays would come early and often.
“Daniel [Lee] and [David] Sealand and Dylan [Freechild] are three of the best defenders in the world,” said Bui. “And when you have weapons like that, you basically say, ‘Who do we want to erase this game?’ … And then they other guys on the defense, we can just fill in gaps.”
“I feel really bad for the other teams’ O-lines,” Bui added.
Sure enough, when PoNY’s Ben Jagt got the disc on the sideline a few throws into the first point, they struck. Chris Strub, squeezing the throwing window to something like the width of a fiberoptic cable, and Lee, reading the play from behind and timing a layout with the precision of a Swiss master watchmaker, combined for the takeaway.
Getting a block and getting a break, though, are different beasts. The tenor of Rhino’s defense in 2024 is a more distilled version of their emphases in recent years, but the delta in that performance is only a difference of degree. Their D-line offense, on the other hand, has been completely remade from the ground up.
“We have a history of being a shoot-it team, and a lot of teams respect our ability to hit deep,” said Lee. “This year we flipped a switch where it was more ‘We’re going to grind this team because we’re so conditioned.’ And they’re scared of the [huck threat]. So we’re gonna send someone deep, and they’re gonna [cover it with] three guys, so we’re gonna have lots of open options downfield.”
As during a lot of the counters in their semifinal takedown of #2 Chicago Machine, steady, patient play was the name for their approach. Sealand collected a pass at the goal line and continued to Vinh Bui for the no-frills score.
Giving up a break is – in the vast majority of games, anyway – a fact of life when two high-level teams get together. PoNY responded by playing a strong offensive point, as you would expect from a team with so much championship game experience. Sam Little (2G), Chris Kocher (2A), and John Randolph (1G, 1A, 1B), who had formed the bedrock of PoNY’s attack for much of the tournament, demonstrated exactly why they reached the final. Despite a pair of excellent block attempts for Rhino’s Aaron Kaplan, PoNY ran a composed, smart sequence that ended in a dream scenario: Randolph with a one-on-one matchup at the front of the goal box.
The next three points, all clean holds, might have been slides for an introductory college course lecture called “Offensive Priorities of New York PoNY and Portland Rhino Slam!.” The PoNY slide would display (via one sharp bold arrow) Little’s relentless full-speed cutting and (with an illegibly complicated dashed line) his balletic backfield footwork. Click. Next slide. And now we have a simple diagram showing a hypothetical Rhino deep thrower (Mica Glass, Matt Rehder) lining up a 55- to 75-yard backhand to Hayes.
Little and Hayes have easily been two of the weekend’s strongest players. The work they’ve done for their clubs’ offenses has been both astoundingly consistent and consistently astounding. Watching Little attack a space before a defender of Lee’s caliber is even ready to move; watching Hayes prepare an inevitable sky over a defender of Conrad Schlör’s caliber – witnessing these moments of greatness is a welcome reward for anyone who has invested time and thought into the game of ultimate.
Depending on where you draw the line, the blowout began either with the Hayes sky or on Rhino’s ensuing two breaks. They took advantage of a pair of execution errors – Scott Heyman dropped a scoober; Jimmy Mickle underthrew a flick huck – to put two more goals on the board. As on their first break, they walked the disc down the field. The point to increase the lead to 6-2 featured an every-other sequence from Ing that answered a question no one had been asking: What would it take to make a passable Dylan Freechild-like out of the most imposing young athlete in the game?
Comebacks are not easy. Outside of the basic mathematical difficulty of having to score a much larger percentage of the points for the remainder of the game, there is a psychological disadvantage: the pressure of not having any more room for error.
“It’s hard to play from behind sometimes,” said Kocher. “You’re a little less free. You’re a little less loose.”
Rhino’s blistering mid-game run spanned halftime. They notched five breaks in seven points to take a 10-3 lead. (PoNY, scoring their third goal, briefly interrupted the rampage. Rhino resumed the hostilities immediately with a positively vicious away blade to Eli Friedman.) Barring a sea change, Rhino had put the game out of reach.
Some of the Rhino’s scores had been relatively easy. Others, however, required an inch-perfect level of execution to work past tremendous defensive efforts. The highlights included a Freechild backhand huck1 that arced beyond Kocher’s considerable defensive bid radius to reach Sealand. Rehder fielded a high-stall steparound backhand through a PoNY bracket a few centimeters in bounds while running with a full head of steam out the sideline. Glass found an angle on a deep shot that even a brilliantly-measured bid from Vinay Valsaraj couldn’t touch: the shape of it ensured that it drifted just beyond his fingertips to reach Hatchett.
While the headline story of the game was how comprehensively Rhino were beating PoNY, there was also an interesting statistical subplot: through 19 points, Rhino had not turned the disc over a single time. That finally changed as New York’s vaunted defense forced high stall situations – Cam Wariner’s lockdown defense on Glass in the dump space was particularly excellent – and attacked the telegraphed escape passes.
Thanks in part to Glass block from behind the reset, his third in two games after showing off fantastic dump defense in their semifinal win over Machine the day before, PoNY failed to convert either of those coverage sacks. Trevor Smith ensured with – what else? – a huck that Rhino would not find themselves in a third tight situation of the point. That hold brought the score to 14-6, by which point hoisting the trophy was only a matter of time.
The fact that New York did not get their talented defense into the game earlier or more often will be a source of regret. “What’s sad about this game to me is that we didn’t get our D-line onto the field enough. We have such a talented and impressive D-line and we were really clicking this tournament, both in our systems and with individual efforts and performances,” said Kocher. “There are certain guys we want on the field who just aren’t getting the run that they would if it was a back-and-forth game.”
Between the stout defensive effort from Portland’s full contingent and their own slightly misaligned execution, though, the PoNY O-line could not stop to rest. Mercifully, Rhino’s D-line ushered them off the field another way: by winning the game. Harper Garvey connected with Kocher down the flick sideline with a long shot, but Kocher couldn’t hang on through the bid. As they had all game, Rhino’s D-line marched deliberately and conservatively down the field. Owen Murphy tossed a short flick to the open side cone for Bui to tie the knot, an appropriately simple ending for the style of play embodied by that unit all weekend.
The raw offensive stats – only 17 possessions to score 15 goals – will surely rank among the best championship game performances in the sport’s history.2 It was not a true perfect game by the numbers, but Rhino cannot have asked for better. “A perfect game for us is usually two turnovers,” said Lee.
Even their opponents came away impressed. “Rhino played a really good game and were better than us in essentially every facet,” said Kocher. “We were playing from behind, and they were playing loose, and they just kept rolling. Congrats to them.”
In spite of the crushing defeat in the final, PoNY will come away from the season knowing that they were without a doubt once again one of the best teams in the country.
“We had a lot of fun this year and had a great tournament,” said Kocher. “[The final] didn’t shake out the way we wanted, but that’s part of sports. It’s what makes winning, when you do win, so special – that it’s really difficult to do.”
Winning is special. It’s special for every Rhino player on the roster – and perhaps especially so for Hayes, Trevor Smith, and coach (and former player) Timmy Perston, who have stayed with the program for a decade or more, through seasons great and mediocre alike.3
It is not only special for players, but for everyone in the Portland – whose nickname, the City of Roses, is represented by a golden rose emblem on their jerseys – and larger Oregon frisbee community who have helped them reach this goal.
“This has been a long time coming. It doesn’t happen overnight, and we have a lot of people to thank for it. A lot of youth coaches, a lot of college coaches who have built Oregon up as a hotbed. Little old Oregon. We feel like we’re disrespected as one of the best ultimate communities in the world,” said Bui. “This right here, is one little piece of it. But it’s a testament to that.”
The spirit of their home community showed through in the joy and determination with which they approached the tournament. To borrow an expression that has nothing at all to do with frisbee, they played in the final and throughout the weekend as if standing on the shoulders of giants.
“Horn. Herd. Heart. That was our mantra all season, and we kept it up,” said Lee.
For my money, it was the throw of the game. ↩
We have been unable to confirm turnover numbers for other years, but we will try to get a handle on the historical statistics and update this sentence with more specific language if we can. ↩
Author’s note: Many more long time Rhinoceroses than this paragraph can fit deserve to be included. I drew the line arbitrarily with those who were with the program in 2014 and have not spent multiple seasons with other clubs. ↩
